Comment 2 for bug 333517

Hi Mark! Thanks for response and the information.

One thing I think is that the actual presentation part should avoid looking too sure of itself. With the classic notification-daemon, there were often notifications pointing at the wrong places on screen because their related applets had moved. Not great for usability, as a user would expect that indication to be correct. I think it could be a bit smoother to have this feel more like a gentle nudge in the right direction; it directs the user's eyes towards where the attached coordinate is If he is reading the notification.

Think of how people indicate things in the real world. One can either point, which is what the old system did, or he can quietly indicate with a nod of the head, for example. Either way, it often feels way easier for everyone to do it with physical movements than with words (or at least a mixture of the two). Especially so when it's up in the air whether someone will read those words in time ;)

Tomorrow I'll hopefully have some time to try different kinds of visual information, and I'll post screencasts probably on a forum thread and ubuntu-devel-discuss.

Two things spring to mind right now:

* Scaling is bad. It's visually quite distracting, and suggests that pointiness thing I want to avoid. Just glide + the existing fade effect could be applied. I was thinking there could be a sort of radial gradient as the notification fades out, so one end (the pointing end) would appear more prominent, giving us the same pointiness as the scale effect without really adding more movement. It could help so the gliding makes a bit more sense without adding more distraction (except for a strong desire to gaze at the awesome effect).
A possibly big issue then is that in some cases the notification bubble ends up racing really quickly across the entire desktop, which could be /slightly/ helped by a parabolic curve for movement speed, but only slightly.

* Just an arrow. Not sure if this is what you're describing, but perhaps no extra animation needs to be done; there could just be a little black arrow pointing out from the notification towards the attached coordinates, varying in style baed on the distance that area is from the bubble. The notification itself would not move.
Seems like that would be an okay last resort, if not the optimal solution. In that case I don't think the loss of roundness would be too bad, and the effect would be super subtle.